Monday, November 29, 2010

"It will take weeks to trawl through the 250,000-plus diplomatic cables released to the world by WikiLeaks, but one thing we know now: America’s relations with the rest of the world will never be the same.

They won’t be the same because the release speaks volumes about the vulnerability and sheer incompetence of a government that cannot even keep its own internal communications secure. That such an enormous cache has been made public – basically the secret history of American diplomacy for the past decade or so – mocks our inflated view of ourselves as the last superpower, or, as the French put it, the “hyper-power.” The hapless hyper-power is more like it.....

Indolent allies pressuring us for war on every side (the Israelis, of course, and the Arabs, too, apparently agitate for war with Iran 24/7), corrupt “leaders” on the take, and the limitless arrogance of US officials, who barge around the world collecting “intelligence” and promises of fealty while trash-talking foreign leaders behind their backs – the portrait of American foreign policy in the making revealed to us by Private Manning isn’t a pretty picture. Nor is it reassuring. What it demonstrates, most of all, is the complete inability of the US to keep a lid on its rapidly-declining overseas empire, which is continually threatening to come apart at the seams – and the vast incompetence of a national security bureaucracy that is riding a tiger and barely holding on for dear life. "